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Metallica Earns Its Top Billing of the Big Four

From left, James Hetfield, Scott Ian, Kerry King, Joey Belladonna and Rob Caggiano performed during the Big Four concert at Yankee Stadium.Credit
Chad Batka for The New York Times

The concert, or the tour, or the notion, is called the Big Four, and it needs an asterisk. Long ago one of the four became much bigger than the rest.

In alphabetical order, Anthrax, Megadeth, Metallica and Slayer — who all played at Yankee Stadium in a thorough and memorable seven-hour concert on Wednesday night — were the most popular bands of mid-1980s thrash-metal. (Some would prefer a Big Five, and include Testament or Exodus.) Thrash was a powerful mutt: it ran at hardcore-punk speeds and wedged hyper-articulate firebomb guitar solos into small spaces.

Now that all those bands are touring together, under that old banner, the order of billing becomes an important question. Imagine all the lawyers, all the cold logic. (Metal, in the ’80s, was a boys’ game built on aggression, not love, and there are well-documented feuds among some of these bands, particularly between Metallica and Megadeth, since Megadeth is led by Dave Mustaine, who was kicked out of Metallica.) In the end, in order of appearance Wednesday, it was Anthrax-Megadeth-Slayer-Metallica.

Of course Metallica goes at the top. Its self-titled fifth album from 1991, with ballad sections and expensive production values, exploded the logic of thrash metal and reached an awful lot of teenage bedrooms. It sold more than 15 million copies in the United States. So Metallica floats this operation. No Metallica, no Yankee Stadium.

Wednesday’s show was the seventh Big Four concert of this year’s tour, which started in April at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, Calif. (The bands played together a number of times last year in Europe as the Big Four and at large festivals.) Before Metallica’s set on Wednesday, José Mangin, the yelling host of “Liquid Metal” on SiriusXM Radio, came on to the stage — situated at the centerfield wall — to declare this the biggest metal show ever on the East Coast. Could that be true? It probably depends on your definition of biggest, and of metal. (Metallica headlined a show at Giants Stadium in 1998, with the rap-metal bands Linkin Park and Limp Bizkit.) In any case, for Metallica, or for any strictly metal band, the concert was a big deal.

It wasn’t surprising that the band wanted to tour this way, surrounded by and lording over its own past. It has long been preoccupied with its own story of starting out scrappy in the early ’80s; it needs to prove its authenticity. And Metallica’s two-hour-plus set earned its top billing, with lasers, flash pots and fireworks; every member of the band performed proprietary stage prances, individual solos and strategic crowd pumping. After 30 years they’re good at this.

The calibrated set list was almost identical to what the band played in Indio. It started with the old (“Creeping Death”), moving to the new (“All Nightmare Long”) and a we’ve-earned-it instrumental section (“Orion”), then the hits and landmarks (“One,” “Master of Puppets”) and back to the old again (“Seek and Destroy”). And it was a proper retrospective, with songs fast and slow and medium, compassionate and merciless.

The last set also included a song involving members of all four bands. Cleverly it was a version of Motorhead’s “Overkill,” a song that keeps stopping and starting up again. Each time it reanimated, a different drummer took over: Lars Ulrich of Metallica, Dave Lombardo of Slayer, Charlie Benante of Anthrax; the guitarists traded off too.

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Anthrax, with the vibrato-heavy singer Joey Belladonna, was the least popular of the four bands: logic dictated that they come on first. But its members are New Yorkers, whereas the rest of the bands come from the West Coast; they also happen to be serious Yankees fans. It would have been nice to give them a higher slot. Still, they’ve always been lower-key than their California counterparts, the opposite of how these things usually play out in American music, and they used their easy disposition to their advantage. Mr. Belladonna hijacked the stadium video camera for a little while, roaming around the lip of the stage, and the guitarist Scott Ian hung an Anthrax banner based on the Yankees logo.

Mr. Mustaine of Megadeth recently set aside some space in his autobiography, “Mustaine: A Heavy Metal Memoir,” to address the issue of where his band fit in the Big Four order. He assured the reader that he was not offended by being put behind Slayer. But he added an interior monologue, italics his: “O.K., we’ll play ahead of you guys on this trip, and God willing we’ll do it again sometime in the near future and we can flip things around.”

He explained that he’d been in the hospital the day before for neck surgery. “I shouldn’t be playing right now,” he told the crowd, “but I’m doing this for you.” And as always he was fascinating to watch: serious and flinty voiced, a generous and hard-working guitar player, as he traded off solos with Chris Broderick, the most recent in a line of second-order Megadeth soloists.

Mr. Mustaine remains a skeptical figure from what we’d now consider a naïve time, when tough-minded, self-taught virtuosos wore spandex; he sang one argumentative song after another, about paranoia and demagoguery and religious wars. But whether the problem was his neck or something else, there was a sense of distance in his performance. He didn’t get all the way in.

Slayer did, though. Its set was the only one of the four without any source of light except the stage: the sun had gone down by “South of Heaven,” and the singer Tom Araya, stock still and staring straight ahead, spit out his lyrics so fast that they couldn’t be displayed on the outfield’s digital screens, as they were for the other bands. For a memorable 40 minutes or so Yankee Stadium became a dark and contemplative place for a performance that ran nearly uninterrupted, except for a few quiet pauses.

The band remains a tight machine, rendering all gestures compressed, even when the guitarists Kerry King and Gary Holt (the Exodus member who is subbing for Jeff Hanneman, sidelined by illness) make their instruments scream. Rhythmically it swung, unlike Metallica, whose rhythm often grew unstable and plodding, especially in its recent songs. It felt armored and unstoppable, and the bizarre circumstance of playing to dozens of thousands of people on a ball field didn’t change a thing.

A version of this review appears in print on September 16, 2011, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Heavy Lineup Has Metallica Hitting Cleanup. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe